By Susan Harb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Weariness showed in John Bontrager's face. He was finishing up the afternoon milking of 18 Holsteins and apologized for the stalls not being cleaner. "There's just so much to do, I didn't get around to it." He had been up since 4 a.m.
John and his wife, Amy, an Amish couple in their mid-twenties with a young son and daughter and an old 160-acre dairy farm to run, were showing my friend Karen and me around their homestead near the town of Shipshewana in northern Indiana.
A light rain fell as we walked from barn to barn, getting a primer on generator-powered hay balers and how to hitch a team of four, six or eight draft horses to a wagon. In the main barn, we stopped.
The rambling wooden building, built by John Bontrager's ancestors in 1915, was empty -- the horses still out to pasture -- and eerily silent. We looked up at hand-hewn beams, each more than a foot square, soaring three stories above our heads. It felt like a sanctuary.
Visiting the Bontragers' farm and spending the night in an Amish guesthouse were part of our fall getaway to the Midwest. Our destination -- Elkhart and LaGrange counties, near the Michigan border -- is home to 25,000 Old Order Amish, making it the group's third-largest U.S. settlement (after Lancaster, Pa., and Holmes County, Ohio). It is also the setting for two weekly auctions, a slew of antiques malls, mom-and-pop shops and a hectic schedule of community festivals.
The Old Order Amish, founded as a small group in Switzerland, migrated to the United States in the early 18th century, and even today its 188,000 adherents famously maintain a separation from the modern world. Members shun cars, do not have electricity in their homes, dress in "plain style" and do not attend school beyond the eighth grade. Shielding their families from outside influences, they say, avoids temptation and allows them to lead simple lives with a strong focus on faith and community.
Our introduction to Amish society started quickly. The first night at our rural B&B near Shipshewana, our host wondered if we might like a carriage ride the next day with her Amish neighbor. In addition to offering buggy rides, Ben Borntreger -- it's not unusual in this society for there to be small variations on some common surnames -- has a guesthouse that he sometimes rents to visitors.
Borntreger, 56, was amiable and forthcoming, full of information -- and surprises. He picked us up wearing a pink shirt, not the dark colors we'd expected. The interior of his carriage was upholstered in red velvet-like fabric and red carpeting -- kind of flashy, we thought, but he assured us it was the norm.
The carriage came equipped with battery-powered running lights, dome lights, a clock and a speedometer. We clipped along at 7 mph, but Borntreger said he has had the horsepower up to 18 -- "just for fun." He gave the hand-cranked windshield wipers a turn. "The rain doesn't bother us -- we don't go fast enough," he said. "It's the wet snow."
Borntreger's carriage horse, Royal, is a Standardbred who didn't make it as a racehorse. The Amish buy these well-mannered horses, saving them from being destroyed, Borntreger told us.
Borntreger is representative of a changing Amish culture. He said he no longer farms his 80 acres, instead allowing a neighbor to grow hay and getting paid a percentage for each bale. He gives buggy rides and arranges farm tours in summer, sleigh rides in winter. He also installs cabinets for an Amish woodworker, organizes auctions and hosts the occasional overnight lodger. We would return to his guesthouse to sleep.
* * *
The weekly auctions in the towns of Nappanee and Shipshewana are great bargains, even if you don't bid on anything. They're anthropological studies in what we keep, toss and hold dear. And they're theater: jubilation on the face of a woman buying a doll and a trunk of clothes like one from her childhood, sadness written all over a farmer watching his well-kept tools disappear one by one.
Advertising signs and porch columns, chicken watering troughs and feathered hats, railroad lanterns and wooden pulpits attract dealers and voyeurs alike. When the starting bell sounded in Shipshewana, eight auctioneers, standing on ladders in front of laden tables filling the 80-by-200-foot building, all started singing at once.
We strained to hear, bouncing from table to table. We missed great buys (but not the beat-up saxophone for $7, twig table for $12 or wicker chair for $25). We accidentally bid against each other. We took a pie break; the Auction Barn Restaurant was featuring rhubarb custard. Bidding goes nonstop until everything is sold, which is usually early afternoon. Or until your friend says, "Your car is full. You can't buy any more."
The pace slowed as we drove yardstick-straight country roads lined with goldenrod and dotted with one-room schoolhouses and white frame homesteads. At Miller's Store, an Amish-owned general store outside Goshen, gaslights made the surroundings seem romantic instead of utilitarian, though the merchandise was far from frivolous: hefty gas-powered irons, work gloves, hairnets, wooden drying racks, hand-crank blenders, harmonicas, local cheese and The Budget, the 117-year-old newspaper printed in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and serving "the Amish-Mennonite Communities Throughout the Americas." The paper keeps families -- without e-mail or telephones -- updated on births, deaths, marriages, bike and buggy accidents, and the weather.
Driving the back roads, we were never quite sure where we were, but we were never far from a shingle shop. The two-county area boasts hundreds of these family-operated businesses, mainly woodworking ventures that turn out everything from birdhouses and backyard swing sets to Arts and Crafts-style oak and cherry furniture.
We also visited toymakers and rug weavers, bakeries and apple presses. The small enterprises help maintain the economic viability of the family farm and allow the Amish to stay home and still earn money. Family farms can no longer support large families, so sons and fathers have gotten jobs in RV factories, mothers and daughters in the hospitality industry.
In Nappanee, the Newmar factory builds RVs priced from $40,000 to $900,000. It accommodates its workforce by sending vans to pick up and deliver employees. Shifts run from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., allowing workers time for farm chores and other daytime pursuits. Our tour guide said that 65 percent of company workers are Amish and that the pay is minimum wage with incentives. "Our average worker earns $25 an hour."
The $1,000-a-week salary is tempting, said Ben Borntreger, our guesthouse owner, whose oldest son chose the factory over the farm.
* * *
At Gohn Bros., a Middlebury shop that has offered sewing notions, fabrics and plain clothing for more than 100 years, the wooden floor creaked under our feet. Men's shirts and trousers are made on the second floor. Hats -- both felt and straw -- come in 24 styles, though we noted some teenage boys wearing black ski caps, not the traditional brimmed hats, as they rode their bikes through town.
There were suspenders and nightshirts, black calfskin dress boots and bolts of heavy denim. We stocked up on black tights, fashionable this fall. Gohn's offers half a dozen styles, as well as black woolen shawls for cold buggy rides.
Nine miles south, in the college town of Goshen, we sought out the Old Bag Factory, home to artists, furniture makers, cafes and specialty shops. Built in 1896, the brick structure glows with creativity as potters and sculptors work in open studios. It began as a soap factory, then was a bag factory, and once made the tiny strips of sheer paper that peek out of Hershey's Kisses.
Downtown Goshen brought the best meal of the trip, in my opinion: fresh seafood and a wine list at Bluegill restaurant on Main Street. Karen disagreed. She savors comfort food, which is what most restaurants in Indiana's Amish country serve: meatloaf or "broasted" chicken with sides of noodles and mashed potatoes.
"What can I say? My dad had an ulcer, and I grew up on bland food," Karen said. "This chicken is just like Grandma's." She ordered it three times.
At the Bluegill, we ate outdoors at a sidewalk table with a view of the bunker-style police booth, built in the 1930s to protect Goshen's banks from the likes of John Dillinger. A few doors away is the red-and-white awning of the Olympia Candy Kitchen, with a soda fountain from the 1920s. We ordered a cherry phosphate. Breakfast and lunch are served; confections are made according to 80-year-old recipes.
Another day, a notice for a haystack supper in Nappanee caught our eye. "What do you think, more noodles?" I asked Karen. "Only if we're lucky," she replied.
We were lucky. Haystack suppers are an Amish tradition, and this one just happened to be a fundraiser for an Amish special-education school. An estimated 1,200 people had dinner with us in a flea market shed.
Plates in hand, we walked a line of women and girls, who each added a scoop of haystack ingredients: cracker crumbs, rice, seasoned hamburger, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, melted Velveeta cheese and crumbled Doritos. We added the last component ourselves: a halo of salsa. All this was washed down with pop, as soda is called in the Midwest. Then we moved to dessert.
Pie-baking is a competitive sport in this part of the country. Best shoofly here, award-winning raspberry cream there, number-one-in-the-state lemon meringue over there. I surveyed the candidates and settled on a wedge of plain pumpkin.
"So what do you think?" asked Karen. I didn't know if she was asking about the trip, the dinner or the dessert.
But my answer was the same. "It's all a slice of heaven," I said, and I went back for seconds.
* * *
Later that afternoon, we returned to Ben Borntreger's farm in time to meet five of his 11 children and his wife, Wilma. We got a first peek at more than 200 new and old quilts that would be auctioned off that weekend and were invited to leave a bid -- or two or three. The sale would be held in the barn. It would take in $53,000.
The house has generators to heat water, run the plumbing and even vacuum the floor; heat is provided by coal, lights by gas. There is a phone with an answering machine in a booth by the barn, but not in the house proper, so as not to disrupt family life. It is a business phone, which Borntreger said meets with the church's approval.
"Wilma has made it clear that she is too busy to run a bed-and-breakfast," our host said as he showed us how to light the lamps in our room. "She doesn't mind you spending the night, but she isn't going to cook for you."
Our quarters, generally used for visiting family members, were spic, span and spartan, except for the shower stall: a circular column in the middle of the bathroom, very modern and very out of character.
"If you want hot water," Borntreger instructed, "turn on the shower, turn on the sink, flush the toilet several times and wait. It will eventually get here."
We read by flickering light and slept under quilts with the windows open. At 4 a.m., the generator kicked on, waking us up and signaling that the family was beginning its day.
Susan Harb last wrote for Travel about painting in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
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